| | | | | | Welcome to Now See This, THR chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s weekly viewer guide newsletter dedicated to cutting through the daunting clutter of the broadcast, cable and streaming TV landscape! Comments and suggestions welcome at daniel.fienberg@thr.com. |
Brooks Mart Lots of stuff premiering this week/weekend, but the best thing you can watch is almost certainly Judd Apatow and Mike Bonfiglio’s HBO two-parter Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! The docuseries, which airs its second installment Friday and, henceforth, will be available on HBO Max, offers a comprehensive overview of Brooks’ career from Your Show of Shows to his latest renaissance. The stories and insights are top-notch, but what really sets the project apart is its emotional exploration of Brooks’ lifelong friendship with Carl Reiner and his marriage to Anne Bancroft, which will surely yield both laughter and tears. HBO also has Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, Spaceballs and History of the World, Part I lined up to stream. You can head over to Tubi for The Producers and to Amazon for To Be or Not To Be. Disappointingly, Silent Movie, The Twelve Chairs and Young Frankenstein are only streaming as rentals. Oh, and Apatow’s stream of comic-centric documentaries continues with Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story, co-directed with Neil Berkeley, which I reviewed timed to its Sundance premiere. |
So You Think You Can Sundance Speaking of Sundance, the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards were announced this week, including nods for Train Dreams and The Perfect Neighbor (both streaming on Netflix), The Alabama Solution (HBO Max), the tremendous If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and several more Sundance 2025 premieres. I’ll be offering pointers on where and when to stream this year’s Oscar nominees as we get closer to the March 15 ceremony, but if you want to be hip and cool and start looking ahead to the 99th Academy Awards, why not follow our complete review coverage from Sundance 2026? I’m mostly reviewing documentaries and, thus far, my personal favorite has been the John Wilson-directed The History of Concrete . Is it Academy-friendly? Dunno. But if you were a fan of How To with John Wilson (streaming on HBO Max), it’s you-friendly. |
| | | Tutti Frutti, Oh ‘The Beauty’ Ryan Murphy makes shows designed for visceral response and after Monster: That Ed Gein Thing and All’s Fair, it’s a relief to have a new Ryan Murphy (and Matt Hodgson) show where that visceral response isn’t “annoyance.” It’s hard to exactly say what the visceral response is to The Beauty , which is half James Bond-lite thriller and half satire of our superficially inclined culture. If aspects of the FX/Hulu series, in which a synthetically produced and sexually transmitted virus makes everybody look like the stars of a Ryan Murphy production, seem familiar, that’s perhaps because you’ve seen or wanted to see such comparable stories as: The Substance (streaming on HBO Max), Death Becomes Her (not streaming anywhere), Eyes Without a Face (Tubi, HBO Max), Shell (Paramount+), Murphy’s own Nip/Tuck (Hulu), The Nutty Professor (Amazon for Jerry Lewis), The Skin I Live In (not streaming), David Cronenberg’s Rabid (Amazon and more) or perhaps the Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder” (Paramount+). |
Living a Life of Ilya-usion In a TV landscape of quick-burn successes, the fiery long tail of the comet that is Heated Rivalry remains remarkable. The HBO Max smash was mentioned in multiple Saturday Night Live sketches last week, and when Hulu announced the season five premiere (Feb. 21) of Shoresy , the streamer’s press release began with the query, “Need Another Hockey Fix?” So, do ya? Need another hockey fix? Or at least more ice-bound canoodling? Well, it’s hard to imagine us reviewing Netflix’s ice dancing drama Finding Her Edge in a Heated Rivalry-free world, though our Angie Han called the younger-skewing drama “occasionally diverting” and suggested watching while doing other things. If you’ve still got that hunger, The Cutting Edge is on Tubi, along with its THREE sequel/remake/reboot thingies. Scraping the bottom of this barrel? Well, um … Spinning Out on Netflix was kinda a guilty pleasure? And 2010’s Ice Castles definitely exists. Yeah, not the same. I get it. |
Can’t Help Himself (Sugar Pie, Honnold Bunch) Wanna watch a man fall off a tall building? You’re probably going to be out of ghoulish luck when it comes to Netflix’s Skyscraper Live, in which Free Solo star Alex Honnold is going to attempt to climb Taipei 101. Live. Kinda. According to our Tony Maglio, the special is going to have a 10-second live-delay , which is honestly for the best. That’s on Friday night and it might be amusing? Or you could have several glasses of wine or your substance of choice, head over to Hulu and watch Free Solo and High Rise back-to-back. Disclaimer: The Now See This newsletter does not endorse streaming under the influence. Or free soloing Taipei 101. |
I Will Let You Down / I Will Make You ‘Bert’ Like much of America, I’ll be watching football on Sunday. Go Pats. Go Rams, I guess. If, however, the respective conference championships aren’t your jam and nothing else in this newsletter has piqued your curiosity — OUCH! — there are a few other streaming options sure to illicit a modicum of curiosity this weekend. Bert Kreischer attempts to upend his shirtless party boy persona in Netflix’s semi-autobiographical (mostly not) six-parter Free Bert , which I thought did some interesting things, but wasn’t actually all that funny. For thrills (but apparently not many), Amazon's Steal offers Sophie Turner in a performance Angie describes as “believably terrified,” though she says the show goes downhill after a promising pilot. |
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